“Just last Friday, I wrote about an annoying problem that had surfaced since the last iTunes update,” Kirk McElhearn writes for Kirkville. “If you didn’t have network access – if you were using, say, a laptop in an area with no wi-fi – iTunes would display a network error dialog.”

“Kudos to Apple for getting the fix out so quickly (i.e., since the iTunes 12.5.4 update, on December 13),” McElhearn writes. “Though the company should have discovered this bug in their testing of the previous version.”

Thank You for supporting MacDailyNews!

10 Comments

For many years I have trusted Apples updates. Those are days past. Because some of the recent update problems I have experienced, the biggest being apps no longer work completely, or time lost trying to get them to work, I have shied away of updating until some research can be done. Only updating a non critical system first. The reputation of Apple has been severely diminished under the current leadership.

Software is not so ‘complex’ if it has documentation, which is what excellent coders provide inside their code.

Microsoft lead the way in how to do things WRONG, despite having one of the greatest advocates for code documentation working for them, Steve McConnell.

Now, it’s obvious that Apple has fallen for ‘Short term thinking; Long term disaster’ by forcing speed of coding over quality of coding AND depending upon individuals to understand the code rather that teams. Someone leaves the company, their code goes to hell. This is the story of QuickTime. It may well be the reason why Apple’s App Store app sucks as well.

iTunes is certainly a BEHEMOTH of code spaghetti. But there’s no sane reason it has to suffer if its properly documented and run under the auspices of a well informed team.

Speaking of the now-fixed iTunes network access flaw . . . Try using the new “TV” function on an iPad at 36,000 feet without a wifi connection. No go: the spinning beach ball of death and a locked up white screen. We were trying to watch episodes of “The Walking Dead” on our pads, but until we paid to get online with the airline’s wifi service, we could not. Wow. We reported this flaw to Apple several weeks ago, but to no avail, as of this date. So sad. (We also reported that TV shows are NOT ALPHABETIZED in that part of the feature, unlike those in “Home Videos,” which clearly are. Still no help there from Apple’s coders, it seems.)

The TV app is a pain in the ass when you just want to watch LOCAL (“Downloaded”) content. And, outside of a fairly short window, it doesn’t prioritize showing you the thing you were in the middle of watching when you come back to it. So, you have to dig around in piles of already-watched content to get back to the video you were in the middle of watching.